The applets on this is just great for understanding many physics concepts. It covers most topics (mechanics, waves, electrostatics, magnetism etc), it has interactive menus so you can change the parameters in the experiments and it logs the output and plots them for you.

Highly recommended for any high school student and even university students. An excellent teaching and learning tool. I highly recommend it to my students since it moves abstract concepts closer to the concrete stage.

If you are a parent, this is a MUST have for your child to aid their learning of physics concepts.

The downside is some of the applets do not work but they are a small minority. Note you need to enable the java function on your browser, just go to Sun Microsystems website, it should work.
August 09, 2007

Great tool for visualizing quantum physics concepts

This book is an attempt to teach modern physics to students by enabling them to visualize various physical phenomena via Java applets designed to demonstrate various physics concepts - thus the name "physlets". The book and its accompanying CD contain around 250 such physlets that span a broad spectrum of physics courses, although the emphasis is on quantum theory. The book has some discussion of the concepts involved, particularly in the context of the parameters of the particular Physlet being examined, but this really wasn't meant to be a textbook. It's just a supplementary text for a variety of physics courses in which visualization of a concept is a real roadblock in learning. The book has 200 exercises, and they are not what you would expect in a physics book. The problems largely consist of running a physlet and answering some questions about your observations, or you are asked to change the input parameters to a physlet and explain what you observe versus what you observed when the default parameter was active. At no point does the author assume you are a Java programmer yourself and ask you to code up your own physlet, although if you know how, that would probably be a very educational activity. The following is the table of contents:

Chapter 1: Introduction to Physlets

Part 1: Special Relativity
Chapter 2: Space and Time in Special Relativity
Chapter 3: Relativistic Mechanics

Part 2: The Need for a Quantum Theory
Chapter 4: From Blackbody to Bohr
Chapter 5: Wave-Particle Duality

Part 3: Quantum Theory
Chapter 6: Classical and Quantum-mechanical Probability
Chapter 7: The Schrödinger Equation
Chapter 8: The Free Particle
Chapter 9: Scattering in One Dimension
Chapter 10: The Infinite Square Well
Chapter 11: Finite Square Wells and Other Piecewise-constant Wells
Chapter 12: Harmonic Oscillators and Other Spatially-varying Wells
Chapter 13: Multi-dimensional Wells

Part 4: Applications
Chapter 14: Atomic, Molecular, and Nuclear Physics
Chapter 15: Statistical Mechanics
August 20, 2006

SIMILAR PRODUCTS

Ranking Task Exercises in Physics: Student Edition (Educational Innovation- Physics)
by T L O'Kuma, D P Maloney, C J Hieggelke

Physlets: Teaching Physics with Interactive Curricular Material (Educational Innovation- Physics)
by Wolfgang Christian, Mario Belloni

Five Easy Lessons: Strategies for Successful Physics Teaching
by Randall D. Knight

Physics
by John D. Cutnell, Kenneth W. Johnson

Peer Instruction: A User's Manual (Educational Innovation- Physics)
by Eric Mazur